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closeVietnam veteran puts his life in danger to save three others 'Doing what's necessary'
Coveted Cross awarded for heroics
Chris Rosenblum
- crosenbl@centredaily.com
Seven bullets dropped the medic, and Spc. Bob Catherman had to choose.
CDT photo/Craig Houtz
Bob Catherman, a veteran of the 101st Airborne Division, holds the Distinguished Service Cross awarded to him for pulling three wounded soldiers out of a firefight in Vietnam in 1968. “Why did I do it?” Catherman said. “Hell, I don’t know. I just did it.”
His convoy had been ambushed. He could stay beside an armored personnel carrier, safe from the small-arms fire and rockets peppering Alpha Company of the 326th Combat Engineer Battalion, 101st Airborne Division.
Or he could crawl and sprint across 50 open yards of flattened, razor-sharp elephant grass to the kid sprawled on top of two torn men and bleeding into the Vietnamese soil. Catherman shed his rucksack.
In the late afternoon of March 25, 1968, he reached the medic and pulled him back. Twice more he returned for the others, another medic and an infantryman. Then, still under fire, he destroyed the bunker that had cut down the three.
For his actions, Catherman, of Milesburg, received the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second highest decoration for valor behind the Medal of Honor. Equal to the Navy Cross and Air Force Cross, about 1,000 were given during the Vietnam War, among the 13,466 awarded since 1917.
That makes Catherman, now 65 and a garage owner, one of the few Centre Countians to earn the award. An official total is hard to come by, but the Home of Heroes Web site, which claims “99.9 percent” complete records of the military’s top honors, lists eight county DSC recipients. Only Catherman is alive.
By all rights, he shouldn’t be, not after three combat tours, not after those mad minutes in a pocked clearing long ago when he risked his life to save three others.
“Why did I do it?” Catherman said. “Hell, I don’t know. I just did it.”
In A Shau Valley
Down a dark tunnel rumbled the convoy of armored personnel carriers.
Alpha and an infantry company were west of Hue, bound for Firebase Bastogne in the emerald graveyard known as the A Shau Valley. Branches and vines pressed down on them.
“The road itself was like the width of a small car,” Catherman said. “Charlie would come and throw a grenade in the back of an APC, dart back into the jungle and you’d never see him. It was that thick.”
Out in front, his squad checked for mines until the convoy stopped for the night. APCs turned off, trampling elephant grass taller than soldiers.
Then, the humid air exploded.
“We started taking incoming fire,” Catherman said. “It was all over the place. You didn’t know exactly where it was coming from.”
Crackling gunfire mixed with shouts and screams. Catherman took cover. Next to a disabled APC, shots cut down an infantry medic tending to a fallen soldier.
Alpha’s medic rushed to their aid, only to be caught in a barrage.
Catherman looked out and saw the pile. “They were badly hit,” he said. He made his choice.
Rounds buzzed overhead and kicked up dirt as he crossed over, holding his M-16. Alpha’s medic had been shot in the legs and stomach. Catherman grabbed his uniform and starting dragging.
“The medic, believe it or not, was coherent,” he said. “He gave himself his own morphine shots.”
Back the same way came the other men. But Catherman wasn’t finished.
It became apparent the APC he charged was straddling a shallow North Vietnamese army bunker no bigger than a desktop.
“Where most of the fire was coming from was out of the tracks of the APC,” he said.
Once the APC managed to move, Catherman crawled close to the bunker, fired suppressing bursts from his rifle, then threw white phosphorous and hand grenades. All three enemy soldiers squeezed inside died.
Within 20 minutes, the attack ceased.
Behind its perimeters, the convoy hunkered down in the steady rain. At dawn, rockets streamed in, starting another firefight.
“We had a bad night, a very bad night,” Catherman said.
The men he saved weren’t around to see it. They had been choppered out after the ambush. Catherman never learned the fate of two, but Alpha’s medic survived. Years later, he wrote Catherman to thank him.
“It kind of shocked me a bit,” Catherman said.
Doing what’s necessary
It wasn’t his worst scrape in Vietnam.
There were plenty of bad times — hot landing zones, two shrapnel head wounds, the carnage of a company wiped out by an errant air strike bomb.
But the Army considered his rescue one of his finest moments.
Originally, he was recommended for the Medal of Honor — which earned him instant respect wherever he went in the war.
“People couldn’t do enough for me,” Catherman said.
Even after his commendation was changed to the DSC, he received the royal treatment.
In spring 1969 he was back home, on leave between his second and third tours, when his phone rang. The brass ordered him to South Vietnam immediately, instead of Fort Bragg as planned, for the award ceremony. At Bien Hoa, a waiting transport whisked him to Camp Eagle, the division headquarters near Phu Bai.
On April 14, now a sergeant, he stood at attention.
Gen. Creighton Abrams, who succeeded William Westmoreland as commander of all U.S. forces during the war, pinned the DSC on Catherman’s chest.
“He had a hell of a handshake,” Catherman said. “He was a little guy, but it was like putting your hand in a vise.”
Betty Catherman believes her husband’s wartime heroism — he also received the Soldier’s Medal for pulling three wounded soldiers out of a minefield — was completely in character.
She remembers the time he raced from his garage to a nearby store after learning the burglar alarm had been tripped.
It turned out to be a malfunction, but Catherman strode in prepared for anything.
“He would rush in and do whatever he could for a person,” Betty Catherman said. “That’s just him.”
Months after gaining his decoration, Catherman began losing faith in the war, disillusioned by seeing hills taken at great cost and then abandoned.
“We were losing lives for nothing,” he said.
But faced with three dying brothers, he didn’t doubt himself.
“You take care of your friends, the whole nine yards,” he said. “You do what’s necessary.”
Chris Rosenblum can be reached at 231-4620.
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